Maybe Most Women Just Don't Want To Pursue STEM Degrees

We keep hearing about the lack of women in STEM fields. It’s portrayed as a crisis, as some cultural sexist paradigm that needs to be undermined and destroyed. After so many years of this effort, you’d think — if the sexism accusation was the cause — women would now be entering STEM in huge numbers.

Well, a World Economic Forum report has the so-called experts kvetching. There has actually been a recent decline of women in STEM fields:

Setting the tone: last November’s The Global Gender Gap Report 2017 from the World Economic Forum (WEF), which sounded the alarm over results that progress toward parity between men and women in technical roles had dropped since the report from the previous year. “In 2017, we should not be seeing progress towards gender parity shift into reverse,” according to Saadia Zahidi, WEF Head of Education, Gender and Work.

Don’t get me wrong — of course an actual attempt to steer women away from pursuing STEM degrees would be a problem in need of remedy. However, when we are seeing results like this — especially after decades of encouraging women towards STEM, and knowing the radical politics of Silicon Valley tech giants doing the hiring — the most likely cause of STEM’s continued gender gap is the obvious one.

Women and men are different. Fewer women want to pursue STEM degrees.

We’ve seen countless programs and grants designed to address the disparity. We’ve had politicians pontificate on it. But what haven’t we seen? Concrete examples of anyone actively trying to keep women out.

So what’s the problem?

Look, men and women are different. They have different drives and want different things out of a career. Men are more willing to spend long hours in solitary work while women tend to want more social work environments. There are exceptions, of course, and that’s why we believe in liberty.

But a disparity does not need to be addressed if it’s simply a matter of choice.

Why isn’t the WEF similarly focused on the massive gender disparity in nursing and teaching? Especially in the case of nursing, concrete examples of men being actively discouraged from entering the field would be easy to find.